Question: How many four-digit positive integers are there with thousands digit $2?$
We are trying to count the number of terms in the sequence $2000,$ $2001,$ $2002,$ $\ldots,$ $2998,$ $2999.$ If we subtract $1999$ from every term in the sequence it becomes $1,$ $2,$ $3,$ $\ldots,$ $999,$ $1000.$ So, there are $1000$ positive integers with $4$ digits and thousands digit $2.$

OR

We could note that there are $10$ choices for each of the digits besides the thousands digit, so there are $$10\times10\times 10=\boxed{1000}$$ positive integers with thousands digit $2.$